Prologue and The Lost World Hypothesis Summary

Ian Malcolm pauses dramatically before proceeding with his lecture. Malcolm makes a dramatic figure indeed in his all-black clothes. He carries a cane due to an injury he acquired in Costa Rica several years before, an injury so severe that Malcolm's death was prematurely forecast. Today, he speaks from a podium at the Santa Fe Institute, in a building that was once a chapel, and addresses an audience of scientists from various disciplines who represent the brightest minds of their day. The scientists have congregated at the Santa Fe Institute to discuss complexity theory, formerly known as chaos theory. Their belief is that the complexity of the world conceals an underlying sense of order that remains to be discovered. The term that science uses to describe the behavior of complex systems is "'self-organizing...